The origin of Santa Maria la Nova is a story of urban displacement. In 1268 Charles I of Anjou, newly installed king of Naples, ordered the demolition of the small Franciscan church of Santa Maria ad Palatium to clear the ground for his new royal fortress, Castel Nuovo. To compensate the friars he granted them, on 10 May 1279, a different site within the city walls on which they erected a Gothic church — la Nova, the new one — to replace the lost foundation. The medieval building served the Friars Minor for three centuries before earthquakes and, decisively, the gunpowder explosion of 13 December 1587 at the fortress of Castel Sant’Elmo wrecked the structure, prompting a full reconstruction.

The basilica visitors see today belongs to that late-Renaissance rebuild, carried out between 1596 and 1599 under the direction of Giovanni Cola di Franco. The flat-fronted facade, attributed to Agnolo Franco, carries a 1599 dedicatory inscription to the Assumption of Mary under Philip II and Philip III of Spain. Inside, a single broad nave is lined by fourteen lateral chapels, seven on each side, that became burial sites for Neapolitan noble houses and for figures of the Spanish viceregal court. Above the nave runs the work that defines the church: a wooden coffered ceiling of 46 gilt-framed panels painted in oil between 1598 and 1603, with three large central scenes by Francesco Curia, Girolamo Imparato and Fabrizio Santafede, surrounded by smaller compartments by Belisario Corenzio, Luigi Rodriguez, Giovanni Bernardino Azzolino and other masters of the Neapolitan late-Mannerist school.

The conventual complex extends beyond the basilica through two cloisters and the spaces of the former monastery, today used for cultural programming rather than monastic life. The ex-convent houses the Museo ARCA of contemporary religious art, while guided access to the cloisters, the chapels and the funerary monuments is coordinated by the Oltre il Chiostro association. Among those monuments, one in particular has drawn international attention since 2014, when the Italian researchers Raffaello Glinni and Marcello Nardini proposed that a sculpted tomb in the complex commemorates Vlad III Țepeș, the Wallachian prince who inspired the figure of Dracula. The identification rests on iconographic reading rather than documentary proof and is not accepted by mainstream historians of the Balkans, but it continues to bring a curious flow of visitors to a basilica that, on its own architectural and artistic merits, ranks among the most coherent late-Renaissance interiors of central Naples.